- cross-posted to:
- aboringdystopia@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- aboringdystopia@lemmy.world
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This doesn’t seem that complex to me. If there is a pedestrian in front of your car when the light turns green, you wait. Pretty fucking simple. This isn’t some offshoot of the trolley problem where an incident was unavoidable. The car made the active decision to proceed when it was not safe to do so.
Why have we programmed our self-driving cars to emulate the psychotic behaviour of a typical road ragin’ car-brained human? Isn’t that the problem these projects should be trying to solve?
I’m going to inject some unpopular nuance here, so I’ll preface by admitting that I haven’t looked further into this event than the information provided in the linked article, which isn’t much. Nevertheless, a few points:
No system is perfect, including exclusively human drivers. Obviously zero accidents is ideal, but as you said, road ragin’ car-brained behavior is typical. How many people are killed every year by human drivers?
Obviously driverless system development should aspire to dynamic reactivity comparable to the best human driver. But when running a cost-benefit analysis for driverless adoption it’s worth considering if, normalizing each by their respective total hours-on-the-road, the mistakes made by driverless cars due to rigid adhesion to traffic laws outnumber the mistakes made by drivers due to their own flagrant disobedience.
That’s an interesting comparison and something I’ve wondered about quite a bit. I would be surprised if machine drivers were not categorically safer than human ones, and if safety is (rightly) a priority in the cost-benefit analysis of driverless car adoption, then it’s hard to imagine not concluding that we ought to proceed in that direction.
But I think this specific incident illustrates very well that the human vs. machine driver debate is tragically myopic. If an infallible machine driver adhering perfectly to traffic laws is empowered to accelerate from a standstill directly into a violent collision with a pedestrian, then maybe it doesn’t matter how “safe” the driver is. I take it as evidence that car travel the way we have it set up is inherently unsafe. Our traffic laws emphasize the convenience of car traffic above everything else – including safety – and only really serve to shift blame when something goes wrong. Despite its certainty, there is very little builtin allowance for human error aside from the begrudging mercy of other parties.
To be fair, human drivers are an unmitigated disaster which we really need to do something about, but I think if we’re going to go through the messy process of reforming how we think about cars, we might as well go farther than a marginal improvement. We could solve the underlying problem and abolish the institution of car dependency altogether, for instance. Otherwise it just amounts to slapping a futuristic band-aid on a set of social and economic issues that will continue to cause unimaginable harm.
A key distinction is that you can hold human drivers accountable and bring them to court. But nobody wants to die because of a glitch.
I’d argue that human drivers are absolutely not held accountable in the US. When my buddy was killed by a driver texting in a giant SUV they gave the driver a small fine and called it an “accident”.
I would respond that in court, the traffic laws are the traffic laws. It looks like the pedestrian is the accountable party here. But from a pedestrian perspective, cars that are only dangerous if you’re jaywalking are objectively an upgrade.
Reminder that paint isn’t infrastructure so if you want people to use the “crosswalk” then it needs to be raised up and it needs a protected middle if you have to cross multiple lanes. If you make the crosswalk actually safer to use then people will use it.
Why have we programmed our self-driving cars to emulate the psychotic behaviour of a typical road ragin’ car-brained human?
Because Elon Musk was involved at some point
To repeat myself from the other post where I’ll probably be downroaded:
The car should be programmed to self-destruct or take out the passengers always. This is the only way it can counter its self-serving bias or conflict of interests. The bonus is that there are fewer deadly machines on the face of the planet and fewer people interested in collateral damage.
Teaching robots to do “collateral damage” would be an excellent path to the Terminator universe.
Make this upfront and clear for all users of these “robotaxis”.
Now the moral conflict becomes very clear: profit vs life. Choose.
self-destruct
What?
take out the passengers
WHAT?!?
The car should be programmed to self-destruct or take out the passengers always.
Users here don’t understanding the dilemma nor the programmatic aspects.
The car has to be programmed to solve the dilemma on the spot:
- Crush the people outside to save the people inside.
- Intentionally crash into a large object or veer off road and risk crashing into a ditch.
Not talking about it won’t make this go away. It will simply be some decision made by developers and maybe there’s a toggle for the car owner, a kill switch. Either way, it’s lose-lose.
As we’re in fuck cars, I’m assuming that people understand that fuck cars. Why should this impunity of killing with cars be furthered by encoding it in automatic programming? Let the owners of vehicles face the immediate consequences of owning such vehicles. That’s fair. Don’t want to die in your robocar? Fine, drive very slowly and very rarely.
- Crush the people outside to save the people inside.
- Intentionally crash into a large object or veer off road and risk crashing into a ditch.
What?
That’s not what happened here, and I struggle to imagine any situation where that’s the only two options.
I struggle to imagine any situation where that’s the only two options.
Alright, I’ll take this in good faith. Here’s how that happens:
Speeding.
As we all know here, speeding makes crashes way worse, and it makes the braking function fail proportionally.
So, imagine:
The killer road bot is speeding through a street. It’s a bit narrow, there are cars parked illegally on the sides.
The killer road bot enters an intersection and makes a left turn with speed and a there’s someone on a crosswalk.
The killer road bot controls at least these aspects of the car: brakes, acceleration, steering. The brakes can be engaged, but the speed makes them useless in preventing running over the person on the crosswalk. The acceleration is not useful. Everything is happening too fast really, and the killer road bot can’t even calculate which direction the person is walking in on the crosswalk.
The only useful control left is direction by steering. The killer road bot thus has these choices:
- Maintain course, run over person on crosswalk
- Change course
Choice 1 leads to the obvious outcome.
Choice 2 branches out:
2.1. Turn left
2.2. Turn right
If the killer road bot turns left (2.1), it flips the car over and sends it rolling into other cars, thus endangering the passenger(s).
If the killed road bot turns right (2.2), it hits a large tree.
These are the only options.
edit: typo
Oh I get now. You have a preconceived agenda that makes this discussion entirely pointless. Either that or you value the trolley problem way too much.
I mean a autonomous vehicle should be programmed to not speed and even not drive faster than reasonable in the present condition.
In switzerland we have a law that you are not allowed to drive faster than the speed with wich you can come to a full stop at the farthest spot on the road that you can see. (So in a curve you have to drive slowly, because there could be something on the street right in front of you.)
If a autonomous vehicle respects such rules, then it at least has eniugh time to calculate several outcomes and choose one which has the least damage potential.
The trolleyproblem is not applicable here as its not a theoretical situation but a practical one.
